Dear Cary,
OK, so a couple of weeks ago, somebody took a big, runny dump on the hood of my car, parked on the street near my house.
Gross. Really, really gross. I assumed it was just a disgusting yet random act, donned rubber gloves and cleaned up the best I could.
But then I go out after a snowstorm and someone has obviously urinated on the snow on the hood of my car. It's not a great car by any means -- just a little blue subcompact, circa 1990. But still, I feel targeted and I don't know what to do with this anger at an anonymous pooper who has decided I deserve this harassment.
For background, I own a home in one of those white-ethnic working-class neighborhoods that time forgot; last year people filmed a movie that took place in the '70s and all they had to do was move the cars. "The pooper" is no doubt one of the many Kevin Federline look-alikes found on every corner; the brown-stained wife-beater undershirt he left behind says as much.
I'm friendly with a few people on the block, but I don't exactly fit in. One neighbor calls me and my fiancée "the quiet couple."
But I still don't know what I could have done to deserve this.
I guess this isn't a big deal; my house is now sold. My fiancée and I are moving to a bright, sunny house in a diverse, progressive middle-class neighborhood in a few weeks. But it's not just the pooper that's got me down. I want to hit somebody and I don't know whom to hit.
What do I do with all the anger that piles up from all the anonymous jerks who make life so unpleasant?
Feeling Pooped On
Dear Feeling Pooped On,
I had a 1959 Chevrolet Apache long-bed pickup truck. It was rusty and didn't run well and I loved it. It didn't fit in my garage, so it was always on the street. It was beautiful like a sculpture. I'm no mechanic. I tried to keep it running. My friend and I had gone in on it together, $400 apiece, so we would have a pickup truck to use on occasion. As it turned out, we hardly used it. It wasn't too reliable.
One day I had parked it near the beach and went out to move it for the street sweeper and both the right-side tires were flat. They had been slashed. I had to replace them. It was expensive. Then the same thing happened the next week -- well, this time the air was let out of the tires on the curb side. I had to have AAA come out and pump them up. Then I went away on a trip and so parked it in another part of the neighborhood, and when I came back the air had been let out of the front right tire again.
There wasn't much I could do. Someone was doing this to me. I had to let it go -- the truck, I mean. And I had to live with the mystery of who did it and why, and was it the same person -- even in a different part of the neighborhood? -- and was I somehow to blame, was there something wrong with parking a beat-up truck on the street, and if so what did I just not understand about life?
My wife says there are people in the world who think an old beat-up truck parked on the street brings down property values and that making such trucks go away, by any means necessary, is a high civic act. She didn't especially like that truck, but I don't think she slashed the tires. She just claims to be able to see into the minds of people unlike us.
I hear what she says but it doesn't register. The way I look at it is more like this: Whales and old men have scars and barnacles. They carry their history on their bodies -- things they have brushed up against, parasites that have attached to them, places they shouldn't have gone but went anyway and got stabbed or shot or just roughed up. An old man will lift his shirt and he'll have at least one nasty old scar somewhere, from an appendix operation or heart surgery, or a bullet wound or knife wound, or a scar above his eye from a fall or a bad car accident. And if ugly old whales could talk I think they'd say, Here's where a shark took a chunk out of me off of Port Angeles! Here's where I got run over by an Evinrude!
If you stick around long enough you're going to get some scars. You're going to get your stuff stolen out of your locker or out of your car. Somebody is going to insult you at a party and you're not going to have a comeback. People are going to shit on the hood of your car.
Can you retaliate in a meaningful and satisfying way, and is retaliation wise? Some would say you can and that revenge is sweet indeed, and they will show you how in books available on the Internet and in certain bookstores. But maybe you believe in karma -- that the heavens house a large but remarkably efficient bureau of eventual retaliation and just humiliation, where experts of arcane arts transform princes into pigs and embezzlers into moles.
If you're in an organized religion or have any moral program or philosophy that works for you, then I guess you follow that. But no matter what you do, whether you believe things are always taken care of in some way without your personal intervention or not, whether you believe that "everything happens for a reason," you're still going to have some uncharitable feelings toward persons unknown who have fucked with your stuff in the dead of night.
How do you deal with that? Thinking doesn't make such feelings disappear.
You just have to live with it. That's the best I've got. There are numerous ways of living with it -- ways to regulate the mind and the passions, ways to channel it, such as exercise and taking your mind off it and meditating about it and going shopping and throwing the ball out in the back yard and chopping some wood and a million other activities to capture the mind in its darkest, most vengeful moods. Whatever works. But there are going to be times that for whatever reason, your heart is just full of murder. You just have to be big enough to carry it.
Everybody carries murderous thoughts; everybody carries big scars.
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What? You want more?
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